I love good guys

snowflake_challenge: Pets of fandom: "Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!"

I unfortunately must take the show-your-ID antihistamines when visiting furry pets. Few characters are similarly afflicted! So some thoughts on just a select few of their pets...

I won't count horses or similar as pets for this purpose, categorizing them as full partners, so that omits Uni (D&DC) and Epona (TLoZ), along with all pokémon, dragons, etc.

In The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda has a cat, white like her horse, and all kudos to the unknown-by-me fan who first cleverly fanon/headcanon-named the unnamed cat "Purra" (after the character Purah in the Wilds games by way of the cat Purry in The Minish Cap). When this Zelda wears a certain enchanted outfit, she can speak with cats throughout Hyrule, and discovers their busy cat lives and receives cat side-quests, my favorite of which is "A Treat for my Person," accessible only after completing two other side quests, in which a cat, originally from Gerudo Desert, needs Zelda's help to give her human, a Seesyde Village fisherperson, a specific Gerudo-flavor smoothie as thanks. (Trivia: In the obscure Tri Force Heroes, Link can similarly wear a costume to talk to cats. And of course he talks to all the animals when he's a wolf in Twilight Princess.)

In Battlestar Galactica (1978), Boxy, Serina and Apollo's son, gets Muffit, an experimental robotic daggit (dog), to succeed the real daggit he lost in the Annihilation of the Colonies. This is explained as training for the robot to be a guard for soldiers on planets, and of all the children in the rag-tag fleet of survivors Boxy alone gets this privilege because of Apollo's connections, but of course the real-world reason Muffy exists is merchandising. That said, Muffy, like the CORA Viper-fighter interface, sits conspicuously, problematically, and wholly unacknowledged at a thematic core of the show. The humans fear all forms of artificial intelligence because of how it led to the Cylons. Yet they keep making things like Muffit and CORA, and a recurring character is a robotics scientist. This nagging inconsistency is likely due to the Cylons mostly representing fears of Soviet communism and nuclear war at the time, not actually social/technology fears. Nevertheless, it's a point in the story that fanfic can explore. (I admit I have a small, WIP draft poking into that; I haven't touched it since before LLMs exploded onto the scene, though.)

In Forever Knight, of course Natalie's cat Sidney is seen on screen once and mentioned on screen a second time, and that's it for the full three seasons of show. As annavere mentioned, animals are generally rarer on screen than in real life, because they're difficult and expensive to work with in acting. But Sidney figures prominently in the fandom's understanding of Natalie, firmly treated as a recurring character in his own right in fanfic. Nick's lack of pets, on the other hand, is given a tragic and fully believable in-universe explanation in the "Blind Faith" flashbacks, as -- and I'm phrasing this carefully to not spoil Annavere, who is watching FK for the first time -- Lacroix sadistically intervenes.

What do you think of pets in these canons...?

snowflake_challenge '25: Set some [fannish] goals

I fulfilled last year's goal to freshen my journal's header and default icon -- thus Bradamante-at-dawn replacing Toronto-at-night! And I made a little progress at reinforcing my antique userpic icons... but I want more freshness, so I'll renew my goal to bring my userpic icons into the current decade.

I made partial progress on my goal to take control of which fandoms show "above the fold" on my AO3 dashboard. As you know, that list orders by quantity, and if several have the same count, their order is random (not alphabetical). So I'll renew my goal to ensure that all 5 "above the fold" fandoms show my major/current fandoms, by writing more fanfic for those that I love more but have written less. (One new BtVS story? Two new TLOZ pieces!) (FK, HL, D&DC, and BSG78 are my top four, of course.)

Speaking of writing fanfic, this year I'd like to set a goal of coming to terms with, and giving myself permission to, post more short pieces. I read and enjoy short pieces! But I always feel that I, personally, am shortchanging the reader when I write them -- that I'm not giving her a fair return on the attention she generously invested. Also, relatedly yet separately, I feel that I, personally, am not giving the characters due respect, building the worlds and experiences that TPTB left hanging or harmed. (I wonder if this is partially because I've largely lived in out-of-production fandoms? Or many other more personal reasons.)

Finally, I'd like to post more here on my journal, in comments on others' journals, and in recommendation communities. I love it here on DW and I want to help build up our community. ♥

snowflake_challenge '25 #2: Share your fannish origin story.

I'm interpreting this prompt as my connecting with others in fandom. (I've behaved fannishly on my own as long as I can remember: fanfic before I knew what fanfic was, making media-inspired toys out of clay, etc.)

Even so, as a prelude, a montage of selected mini-flashbacks:

• Without ever being part of fandom himself, my father has loved Star Trek since he watched the original on the communal dorm TV in college, and I grew up watching it with him, first TOS reruns, later TNG. That's one.
• Another milestone, in late junior high or early high school, was an event at a mini-mall in a neighboring town; it was more a sidewalk-sale by the local comic shop and a collectibles-and-games store I didn't previously know existed than the "convention" they advertised, but I remember it. Late in high school, in a different state, was my first "real" convention, a Trek con; Marina Sirtis was the top featured guest.
• Also late in high school, I discovered that a certain local bookstore held monthly Saturday viewings of vintage recorded-from-PBS Doctor Who in a back corner, and folks were free to come and go and watch and chat all day on folding chairs.
• In college, I found folks to share the communal dorm TV with for DS9, and then HL, and then got my own TV-and-VCR combo unit, and a particular friend would come over to share new Trek between the two of us, no more struggles for the common TV. Once, when it was my turn as a member of dorm government to sponsor a social, I hosted a Highlander marathon with my recorded-from-TV VHS tapes; the event was surprisingly successful far beyond what I presumed was the target audience.

This brings us to Forever Knight. I discovered the show in December of season three, on the USA cable channel, was reeled in ("brought across," folks used to say) by "Night in Question," and began gobbling up the reruns (of season three only; which is now by far my least favorite season) that USA was rerunning in blocks during the holidays, and found the "real" syndicated airings on a local station. I looked up FK at the public library to read about it in Starlog back issues and newspaper articles... and very soon discovered -- from a newspaper article written by a local TV critic in the local paper! oh, I miss well-funded local papers -- that FK was facing cancellation and fans were trying to save it. From there, I learned to use the infant World Wide Web specifically to learn more about SOS-FK, which led to the FK email lists, which were, of course, my entry point to actually being part of the fandom community we all share now.

Challenge #10: Five things... or, you know, whatever you want.

The movies I saw in a theater in the past calendar year, in reverse order:

December: The Boy and the Heron
November: The Marvels
August: Blue Beetle
July: Barbie
June: The Flash
June: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
June: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
May: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
April: Suzume
March: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
February: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Crowded June!

(I do still wear an N95 in theaters. It could be overkill, but I don't eat theater food, anyway, so it's no trouble -- at least, not since I found the fantastic 3M style that doesn't fog glasses.)